Someone should do a study on whether people who change their sex go on to live satisfying lives. It's quite possible that most of these people are just chronically unsatisfied, no matter what their circumstance is.

Actually, I am a Rocket Scientist. Also hormonally odd (my blood has 46xy chromosomes anyway) and for most of my life, I looked male, and lived as one, trying to be the best Man a Gal could be. Anyway, in May 2005 that started changing naturally for reasons still unclear, and I'm now Zoe, not Alan : happier and more relaxed not to have to pretend any more.

More here. It made his marriage difficult, for understandable reasons.

But let's be honest with ourselves. Is jumping off a cliff strapped in a kite really the best way to work out this unfortunate body displacement, considering your responsibilities and the people and animals that rely on your wellbeing?

Studies have shown that TGs have the same type of neural dysfunction that people that have elective amputations do, but at least in this country we don't let "this leg doesn't feel like it's part of me" be an excuse to hack it off.

Chip I haven't flown for months for just that reason. I'm getting my will and trusts in order so that things can continue on without me as smoothly as possible.

I've been expecting to die any day now for years, but things just keep going and getting better all the time. It's very frustrating. You just can't count on anything anymore.

If I had my choice, I would love to check out while flying. A heart attack while flying over Yosemite Valley would be ideal. Followed by a series of clunks against the face of Half-Dome on the way down like Wylie Coyote, with a nice landing in a meadow of high grass at the base of a waterfall. Aaaaaahhhh. I need to get "Acme Flying Machines" stenciled on my glider. Then a bear could bear could come along and drag me off. It would be a mystery in all the papers. Fame without the paparazzi. I might even make it on Althouse and everyone could give me the Darwin award treatment.

Doesn't that beat the hell out of months of bed pans, I.V.s, respirators, shitty sheets and morphine?

It seems very anti-individual, this idea of thinking you are a gender that doesn't belong in your body. How do you know you feel anything other than *you*?

I see a lot of transgendered as the same types of people as those who cover tevery inch of skin,or face, with tattoos. There is something about their body and identity they want to be different, permanently. I don't know if anyone really knows what it is.

Someone should do a study on whether people who change their sex go on to live satisfying lives. It's quite possible that most of these people are just chronically unsatisfied, no matter what their circumstance is.

Sorun: At least one such study has been done at Johns Hopkins:

The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jon Meyer was already developing a means of following up with adults who received sex-change operations at Hopkins in order to see how much the surgery had helped them. He found that most of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it. But in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition. They had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled.

Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins, concluded:

...Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.